Astroblog

Obscured by Clouds. The rough and ready blog of a cloud benighted biologist and amateur astronomer. Astroblog will cover my interests in astronomy, biology and Life, the Universe and Everything.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

The Dance of the Planets.

Western horizon as seen at 6:30 pm from Adelaide on Sunday 3 August. (click to enlarge, similar views seen elsewhere in the southern hemisphere)

If you go watch the western horizon during twilight for the next week, you will see some amazing things. Starting on Saturday August 2, the Crescent Moon, Venus, Regulus, Saturn and Mars form a terrific line-up. You will need a flat, unobstructed horizon to see this, as the Moon and Venus will be just under a hand-span and a half above the western horizon half an hour after local sunset (start looking around this time).

Then on August 3 the Moon is near Saturn (see image above), and on August 4th the Moon is near Mars. During this time Venus draw close to Regulus, and on August 5-6 Venus and Regulus are close. Mercury then joins the lineup, and by August 10 Mercury and Regulus are close. At this time you can easily see all 5 classic planets that are visible to the unaided eye (Mercury, Venus and Mars and Saturn in the West, Jupiter in the east).

While this can be difficult to see due to the narrow window of time between when the faint planets become visible and Venus sets, this will be well worth the effort.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Aquariid Meteor shower, Monday July 28 - Tuesday July 29

In the late evening of Monday 28 July to the early morning of Tuesday 29 July, the Aquariid meteor shower may be seen. Places with clear, dark skies should see a meteor every 3-5 minutes or so. While not a storm, it is still enough to enjoy.

At 10 pm Monday evening, face east, and look 4 hand spans and two finger widths above the horizon. One finger width right is the 4th magnitude star delta d Aquarii. The radiant is just above this star, see the map for more detail. This meteor shower should be visible from 10.00pm until dawn, with better meteor rates after midnight.

Carnival of Space #64 is here.

Carnival of Space #64 is now playing at Music of the Spheres (is that a cool blog name or what?). There are stories on how to weigh a black hole, active galactic nuclei, haeps of Moon posts, top 10 telescopes, a review of Stellarium, a video of the Moon occulting Earth from DeepImpact and lots, lots more. Whistle a happy tune and wander on over.

The Advertiser's War on Science II

Chris Kenny has another column on climate change in this weeks Adelaide Advertiser. Unfortunately, once again he fails to understand the science (or how science works)

Look at the graph to the left, then read this quote from Chris Kenny's column.

It is also a fact to say that the climate is always changing. And that no one has yet proved a link between human activities and/or carbon emissions and climate change. Sure, there are theories and models, some of which are widely respected. But there is no proven science.

I'll say this again, proof is for mathematics and whisky, science is about evidence (inference to the best explanation if you want to be technical). And what the heck is "proven science"? We collect evidence for or against specific hypotheses, we don't try and prove science (fans of Popper and Kuhn can go duke it out somewhere else). Evidence, collected by imperfect humans using imperfect instruments.

Science can almost never produce 100% certainty. We're 100% certain that earth is an oblate spheroid, and that Earth orbits the Sun, everything else comes with error bars. Small error bars in many cases, some aspects of general relativity have been measured to better than one part in a billion (that's really accurate), but error bars nonetheless. This is pounced on by many like creationists, HIV-denialists and anti-vaccinationists. To them, any degree of uncertainty means that the whole enterprise is discredited, and their brand of nonsense is more valid.

Things like biology and climate rarely have the nice, tight error bars that physics (mostly) gets (ask me about lysophosphatidic acid receptors and neurite growth some time), but we do have evidence. In the case of climate change, multiple forms of evidence, from actual temperature changes, to changing flowering patterns, to changing migration patterns to rises in sea level. To interpret this evidence we use theories and models. ALL science uses theories and models to interpret evidence (like the germ theory of disease), disparaging theories and models means you don't understand science.

And sometimes we have to act when our understanding is less than complete, John Snow did not wait until he had near prefect understanding of disease transmission, or even had a germ theory of disease, before getting the Broad Street Pump replaced during a cholera epidemic. Our understanding of climate change is imperfect, but we know that the climate is warming, and most of it is due to human activities. This is solidly based in physical law, you put more carbon dioxide into an atmosphere, it will retain more heat, this is high school science class stuff.

Chris Kerry misunderstands science again:

People are scorned as "deniers" simply for pointing out the scientifically agreed fact that Earth has not warmed for a decade.

First off, it is not a "scientifically agreed fact" that Earth hasn't warmed for a decade (see my original post), the earth hasn't stopped warming, no matter whether you use the GISS, Hadely or RSS databases, temperature is still going up. Climate scientists are in fact united in saying that the world has not stopped warming.

You don't get called a denier for saying the world has stopped warming, you get called a denier for keeping on saying that after the facts have been patiently explained to you numerous times.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Building an Orrery (part 2)

As I mentioned before, MiddleOne and I are building an Orrery, a model solar system. We are putting together one that is coming in parts as a magazine (Build a Model Solar System), so we have to wait about two weeks for a chunk of parts, and then we have to wait even longer to get enough parts to make a chunk of Orrery.

But we finally got enough parts to get started, MiddleOne was champing at the bit, and well, the whole thing is really cool, and a good chance to learn about the solar system.

The first thing we learnt was that the screws are really small, and have a startling tendency to roll away into hard to find places. The second thing we learned is that you need a really small (as in narrow) set of Allen Keys for many of the screws (luckily we had one of those, advantage of a geek household).

The third thing we learned is that most of the tiny screws were too small for MiddleOnes hands, so he gets to do the big chunky things, and I set up, or actually do, the smallest screws (which always seem to be located in the most inconvenient spots). Still, instead of watching TV we have got Mercury and Venus set up. It even works at this stage, so we can see the Venus - Mercury periodicity as they orbit!

We are hanging out for the next section, Earth Moon. If you want to see a video of the construction and final Orrery, here is a video.

I saw Venus!

After days and days of grey cloud and intermittent rain, the evening sky was clear when I came home yesterday evening. There, glowing above the horizon, was Venus! Venus will be doing some exciting things in the coming weeks, so seeing her was a pleasant harbinger.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Squid Blogging

I went over to Melbourne to meet up with the Bettdeckererschnapenderweisle and the boys, who had gone over earlier for her sisters’ multidecade birthday celebration. I got to have my choice of Melbourne outing, as everyone else had been enjoying themselves while I organised exam results, so I chose to go to the museum. This was also a popular choice for the boys as there is a children’s centre in the Museum. SurferDad and Sistersson also came along.

We had a bit of trouble parking, as the museum car park was full, unusual; we thought, as this was a week day and the school holidays were over in Victoria. Then as we tramped up to the entrance, we saw an ABC camera crew setting up. Interesting, we thought. After purchasing our tickets (should we go for the IMAX 3D dinosaur presentation, or the special exhibition on dinosaur eggs and babies, we chose the latter after some indecision), the lady who handed us our tickets casually mentioned, “Oh, and if you go around the corner, they are just about to start the giant squid dissection”. Er, what?

Fishermen had pulled up a recently deceased giant squid off the coast of southern Victoria. The museum was going to do a public dissection of this giant beast, and webcasting the entire event (you can see the webcast here). This was big news in Melbourne (Sydney had the Pope, but Melbourne had a giant Squid, take that Sydney. PZ Myers would be pleased.) but of course I and my family, blithe Adeliadeans who ignore the Sydney-Melbourne rivalry thing, had no idea, and had walked into a big event by accident.

Unfortunately, around half of Melbourne was there as well, even though it was a school day (okay, I exaggerate; it was only about a quarter). I didn’t know there was so much interest in oversized calamari. We could just see the big screen the heads of the crowd, over in corner I could see the Catalyst crew setting up. Still, despite the crowds, we could hear what was going on and see a fair bit. SurferDad and I stayed the longest, the rest wandered off in a parallel exhibit. They were a bit bothered by the overpowering smell of calamari. I did learn that you can tell the age of a squid by the growth bands in its beak, and that Giant squid have a most impressive radula, the rasp like tongue they use to grind down their food. Then we had to go and see the Dinosaur eggs and missed the main part of the dissection.

By the time we came back the dissection was almost over, and they were sewing the squid up for preservation, the crowd had thinned and we could get a good look. SmallestOne and Sisterson were pretty curious, but EldestOne was not really turned on by a mass of tentacles (why I have no idea).

We complemented this completely unexpected event by a quick trip to the marine section, where there was an exhibit on giant squid to learn more. All in all, a most exciting day.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

The Advertiser's War on Science

One of the things I'm passionate about is science communication. Understanding science, and its tools and methods, are critical for citizens to make informed decisions on issues from gene-modified foods to global warming. The need to understand and communicate science is highlighted by a recent column by Chris Kerry, of my local paper the Advertiser. In it he claims that global warming ended in 1998. Unfortunately, it hasn’t (see the graphs here and scroll down), but to understand why you need to know something about statistics.

First, let me reacquaint you with the Arrhenius equation, this says, for a given input of radiation, if you add more carbon dioxide to an atmosphere, it will warm up in a predictable manner. It’s standard physics, and you can readily calculate how much warmer the earth will get given the amounts of carbon dioxide we are injecting into the atmosphere. But why, you say, if this is simple physics, don’t we see a smooth rise in global temperatures? Because the climate record is noisy.

Superimposed on the CO2 induced rise in temperature is noisy from a wide variety of sources, dust from volcanoes, heat shifts in the ocean from El Nino and La Nina events and a whole host so other sources. These effects put wobbles in the line that may be misleading if we don’t understand what is going on.

Have a look at the graph at the top left above, it looks like the graph starts off flat, rises somewhat then flattens out. Much like the graph Kerry refers to in his column.

But the illustration is in fact a relentlessly rising line. I have merely added some noise to it (for the technically minded I used RAND()*(-0.5-0.5)+0.5 to add random numbers ranging between -0.5 and 0.5 to the dataset). The graph below it shows the actual line that underlies the noisy data.

The graph below that again shows the actual temperature record from GIS TEMP,, how do we extract the underlying trend? What you don’t do is look at the last few data points. If you took the last 5 data points of my graph and look at the trend, it comes out nearly flat, yet we know that the curve is rising, you need to sample more pints to get a clear feel for the trend. In global warming data, you need to sample between 10-15 years to see the underlying trend, and that trend is relentlessly upwards.

So, no, global warming did not stop in 1998 and global temperatures have not dropped since 1998.

Semi-Live Occultation Blogging

The Moon has been hopping in an out of clouds all night. At one point there was a fantastic Moon bow around the Moon, but just as I got the camera set up it went away. 20 minutes to go, and there is only a minor likelihood I'll get any shots at all.

Update (well you have probably seen the new post anyway), didn't get any shots of the occultation with the webcam (sigh), but not because of the weather. Here is the Moonbow and a shot of Antares well before occultation).Moonbow (as always, click to enlarge). The Moonbows came back several times over the evening, this is probably the best image I got (the ring is unsymmetrical because the cloud was thinner at the edge). The whole thing was crisper an clearer by eye, but this shot does actually convey a good sense of the colours I could see, you can vaguely see the second coloured ring, and Antares is the dot below and left of the overexposed Moon.

Antares gets closer to the Moon. This was taken via the lens with my Olympus digital camera. If I had set the webcam up then I might have caught the occultation. But as I said, clouds came over and I was worried by the possibility of rain, so I held off, thus missing out on the event itself.

The Moon will be four days before full and quite high in the sky in most of Australia. In New Zealand, the occultation occurs in the veryearly hours of the morning of the 15th. While visible to the unaidedeye, this event will be good in binoculars or a small telescope. Because it occurs relatively early, this one is good for the kids to watch.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Carnival of Space #62 is here.

Carnival of Space #62 is now jumping under the flashing lights at the Space Disco. This week has a gallery of photos theme, there's images of Titan, cool new space suits, Martian soil, the first woman astronaut, the Variable star Mira and lots, lots more! Put on you dancing shoes and jive on over.

Mars and Saturn close tonight (10 July)

The north-western evening sky around 7 pm local time as seen from the southern hemisphere (click to enlarge).

Mars has been heading towards Saturn all week, and tonight it catches it! Mars will be less than a finger width away from the ringed world (that's around 40 arc minutes for the technically minded). A lovely sight in the early evening (hopefully I will get a break in the cloud).

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

First Light for the ToUCam

The images on the left are the ones I have just taken tonight with my new ToUCam. The images to the right were taken (about a year ago) with my old Logitech Quickcam webcam. Now, conditions weren't identical, there was cloud over the Moon and Jupiter tonight, and the turbulence was pretty bad. But it was the first time that the sky was sufficiently clear for anything, and I've been waiting to try the camera for so long, that I just had to go out. And it was the opposition of Jupiter tonight, I just had to have a go.

The neighbours saw me set up and we had a mini-star party as I set up the camera. There was even a halo around the Moon to point out to them while I fiddled and grumbled making sure that the finderscope actually pointed in the same direction as the telescope. Finally I got the scope pointing the right way, focussed protperly and worked out the exposure settings and we could see the awesome spledor of the Moon on the computer screen. The images on the screen were sufficiently sharp to impress the neigbours, and we had a nice time exploring the Moon, then a less satisfying time with Jupiter.

Despite the horrible conditions, I think you can see that the ToUCam did quite well compared to the old Quickcam. I'm looking forward to having some clear, still nights in the future to really test it out (and hopefully, when I can actually SEE the southern cross I can do a better job of polar alignment.

Mind you, this post was nearly titled EPIC FAIL. I actually bought the ToUCam a while ago, not too long after I bought my new laptop to replace my elderly one whose screen had just died. Unfortunately, the laptop came preloaded with Vista, and as work is transitioning to Vista I needed that for compatibility. But Vista is notorious for not having drivers. Indeed that ToUCam 840K does not have Vista drivers, but there was a workaround on the Philips website, so off I went full of confidence.

And failed.

The install sequence is a little complicated, but when I should have had this screen

Which would have allowed me to continue and install the drivers, I got this.

Which just wouldn't let me go any further. I tried everything, deleted and reinstalled, tried the suggestions here and here and here (to no avail) hung out on forums, sent off emails to people who had said they had succeeded, but never heard back. Nothing worked, not even colourful expletives.

I was feeling a little despondent. Should I have gone for the Meade Lunar and Planetary Imager instead? No, it turns out that it is not Windows Vista compatible either (there is a work around if you hunt around), in fact most of the affordable webcam/imager systems for amateur astronomers are not Vista compatible. I picked up a book on photographing the Moon and it fell open at a section which said that the ToUCam was the most popular astronomical webcam, giving instructions for its use. I could have wept in frustration.

In the end I did the only thing possible. I bodged up a repair to the old laptop. So now my setup takes twice as long, as I have to drag out and attach a separate screen for the elderly laptop. But it works. The ToUCam software loaded sweetly under Windows ME (remember that?), and my copy of Vega runs the ToUcam without a problem.

So, on a clear night you may see me out the back with an enourmous pile of what looks like scrap metal next to my telescope. It's my bodge computer systems, and it takes nice images, thank you.

Opposition of Jupiter Tonight.

The eastern horizon as seen from the southern hemisphere around 7:30 pm local time. Jupiter is just under the "Teapot" of Sagittarius. The inset shows the opposition of Jupiter's Galilean Moons at this time. Callisto and Ganymede should be easily visible in binoculars (click on the image to enl;arge it).

Tonight is the Opposition of Jupiter, when this planet is biggest and brightest in the sky. Well, Jupiter is always big and bright, but this is now a really good time to loook at Jupiter in a telescope. If you don't have a telescope, but do have binoculars, you can easily follow the changing positions of the Galilean Moons. Otherwise, plead with a friend who has a telescope of go to your local astronomical societie's or planetarium's open day.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Still More lineups!

Still horrible and cloudy here (I did get a quick shot of yesterdays line-up of Regulus, Mars, Saturn and the Moon through a break in the cloud, I may post it later). However, Paul Moss of Wellington New Zealand has sent another fantastic image of the line-up as it is tonight (you really have to click on it to see it in all its glory). He's also set up a special web page so you can view the sequence of the line-up as well, go over and have a look.

Tony Travaglia, also of New Zealand, has sent in this shot of the line-up from last night (click to enlarge). Another marvellous shot from Tony, and the halo round the moon is a nice extra.

Line-up on Monday

Monday saw the Moon on the other side of the plaentary line-up. Here is a great shot, again from Paul Moss of Wellington New Zealand (click the image to enlarge it). As for yesterday, a full scale image, plus several more of the line-up, can be found at www.astronomy.net.nz .

Sunday, July 06, 2008

Images of the Lineup.

Well, of course it rained here. So I couldn't see the line-up of Mars, Saturn Regulus and the Moon. Fortunately some readers sent in some splendid images, which cheered me up immensely.

First off is Peter Moss, from Wellington New Zealand (click the image to enlarge it). A full scale image, plus several more of the line-up, can be found at www.astronomy.net.nz .

Next up is Tony Travaglia, also of New Zealand. He took this image of the line-up with a Canon 40D 70-200 mm lens at SO 400, with an exposure of 5 secs at f3.5 using a 70mm zoom. Beautiful image (click it to enlarge).

Friday, July 04, 2008

Carnival of Space #61 is here.

Carnival of Space #61 is now up at Mang's Bat Cave. This is the special edition marking the the 100th Anniversary of the Tunguska Event. If you are not interested in big rocks going BOOM, there is lots for you as well, more on the Phoenix Mars mission, space science , art insight, NEOSAT and much, much more. Flap on over and roost for a read.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Nanotech at the pub

So I took the kids to the Science Outside the Square event on "Nanotech for the terrified" at the Govenor Hindmarsh pub. After being initially excited (I had promised lasers), they were a bit ho-hum about the idea (we had to leave the house after all), but the Cute Master of Darkness came along too so that cheered them a bit. The idea of Science outside the Square is to present interesting and important science topics in a way that can be understood by folks without a science background. Nanotech has been a lot in the news lately and there is as much angst about nanotech as there is about Genetically Modified crops. Not helped by HRH Prince Charles rabbiting on about Grey Goo.

We arrived a little bit early (man I suck at finding parking spots), and the venue was already full (this was the second time the presentation was run, the first was overbooked. they have enough bookings to run it a third time, and probably will. That gives you an idea of the interest out there). We had to squeeze over onto a table with a very oblique view of the stage. This made viewing the powerpoint presentations difficult, but actually mattered very little.

The speakers were engaging and interesting from an adults point of view, but I could see the kids were fading (hey, I promised them lasers!). Then the hands on part started up. First we were handed those peanut starch sticks that are supposed to replace styrofoam, and had to make Bucky Balls of carbon nanotube models out of them (they stick together if you lick them, I am so making molecular models with them). The Cute Master of Darkness made a great nanotube, my Bucky ball ended up as a bucky hat. Middle One produced chicken wire.

Then they did live demonstrations of nanotech products (involves a kids wading pool and spaghetti, I won't spoil it if you want to go to the next one), then they handed out LEDs, batteries and superstrong magnets, and we made LED throwies (the kids LOVED that, despite there being no lasers). The video below shows one such throwie on the table, being controlled by another magnet. That table was an inch thick bit of wood (the weird object is my Bucky hat).

There were quizzes and prizes, and everyone learned something about nanotech. It was a fantastic night and a fantastic event, so if you have a chance, go along to Science outside the square.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

I'm on the Radio Again (Twice!)

For those of you who would like to hear my broad, rasping Queensland accent, I'm on the Radio again. Twice no less.

ABC Radio Ballarat have invited me back to talk about my other passion, Pharmacology. If you want to know the connection between treacle, crushed vipers heads and modern drugs, or how I plan to save endangered Cheetahs using grape extracts, and if you are in the broadcast region of ABC Ballarat, then have a listen this Thursday morning (July 3) around 10:15 am or so, I'll be talking about drugs for around 10 minutes.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Mercury, Alderbaran and the Moon

The crescent Moon, Alderbaran (dot top right) and Mercury (dot bottom right), as usual click on the image to get an enlarged version where you can see fainter stars.

The clouds have been playing peek-a-boo with me, but I managed to get this shot after a break in the rain. Had to stand in a puddle in the middle of the street to get it, as Mercury and the Moon were inconveniently behind a tree from my backyard vantage point.